Posts Tagged «hacking»

While Tesla’s Model S might be physically the safest car on the road, once it’s parked up by the curb, it’s not very secure at all. That’s according to a security researcher, who says the Model S is very vulnerable to some rudimentary hacking techniques, allowing a would-be thief to remotely locate your car, unlock its doors, and then steal all your stuff. Fortunately, the researcher hasn’t yet found a way of starting a Model S without the key fob, but given how security always eventually falls to hackers, it’s just a matter of time.

Over the weekend, it emerged that Valve’s Anti-Cheat software (VAC) was scanning your computer’s internet history and reporting a list of visited websites back to Valve. Obviously, the internet immediately entered a state of privileged outrage, spitting apoplectically and claiming that Valve was spying on our porn-surfing habits. According to Valve CEO Gabe Newell, though, who took to Reddit to officially respond to the claims, VAC does nothing of the sort — it does search your internet history, but it only looks for very specific markers left behind by certain cheats. Your surfing history is never sent to Valve, and they don’t care about which porn sites you visit.

On April 8 2014, almost thirteen years after it was first released, Windows XP will finally breathe its last breath and die — officially, anyway. From that date, Microsoft will no longer support the inveterate OS, meaning instability bugs and security vulnerabilities will go forever unpatched. With Windows XP’s desktop market share still around 30%, and many enterprises still months or years away from upgrading to Windows 7/8, these unsupported and insecure machines represent a serious risk to the health and security of the internet and other high-tech infrastructure. If just a single zero-day vulnerability is found after April 8, it will never be fixed. There’s no telling what damage cybercriminals might sow with such an exploit.

A high-tech criminal group in Europe has been infecting ATMs (cash machines) with malware, and then completely emptying the machines without a trace. The group has not yet been caught and the attacks continue — and thus very few details have been released — but we assume that they’ve already made off with millions of pounds/euros. The best bit: The hack is carried out by plugging an infected USB stick into ATMs that run Windows XP.

Security researchers have successfully broken one of the most secure encryption algorithms, 4096-bit RSA, by listening — yes, with a microphone — to a computer as it decrypts some encrypted data. The attack is fairly simple and can be carried out with rudimentary hardware. The repercussions for the average computer user are minimal, but if you’re a secret agent, power user, or some other kind of encryption-using miscreant, you may want to reach for the Rammstein when decrypting your data.

With the public release of iOS 7, the question on everyone’s lips is: When will there be an iOS 7 jailbreak? This is a complex question with a lot of variables. If you have an older iPhone, such as the 4 or 4S, a jailbreak might be available to download rather soon; if you have the iPhone 5 or 5S, you will probably be waiting a long time. Let’s dive into the specifics of iOS, iPhone, and iPad jailbreaking, and discuss when (or if) an Evasi0n or Redsn0w jailbreak will ever be available to download.

Apple announced the iPhone 5S with a fingerprint scanner at its fall event. So will the 5S be completely impenetrable? Just because your fingerprints are unique, that doesn’t necessarily mean no one can use them to gain access to your phone.

Yesterday, a hacker group — most likely the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) — managed to redirect The New York Times, Twitter, and Huffington Post websites to alternate, defaced websites. These websites were down for hours, and in some cases are still down more than 24 hours later. How did a single hacker group manage to hoodwink dozens of network admins and security specialists, and run rings around three of the largest web properties? In this story, we dive into the specifics of the attack — and discuss how the NYT, Twitter, and HuffPo could’ve better protected themselves.

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